By Anirban Bhaumik
April is a month of festivity in Assam. It’s the month of Rongali Bihu — the state’s biggest festival, Assamese new year and onset of spring. The mood was festive across the Brahmaputra Valley in the April of 1979 too, as the historic Assam agitation led by All Assam Students’ Union was still in its early days and yet to turn tumultuous. About a week before the Bihu, some youths met at the Rang-Ghar, the 17th century amphitheatre at Sivasagar and founded what was later known as United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA).
Buddheshwar Gogoi, a schoolteacher, took over as chairman of ULFA, which set as its ultimate goal ‘a sovereign Assam.’ The day was April 7. Another youth Rajib Rajkonwar — just 23 years then — joined the organisation a few months later and soon reached its helm, replacing Gogoi. Then came Paresh Barua, a 22-year-old soccer freak, who would later lead the ULFA’s armed wing as its ‘commander-in-chief’.
Rajkonwar — better known by his nom de guerre Arabinda Rajkhowa — and Barua would then lead one of the longest running insurgencies of South Asia, surviving two major campaigns by the Indian Army — Operation Bajrang and Operation Rhino — in early and mid 1990s, in addition to sustained offensive by police and paramilitary forces. Together Rajkhowa and Barua scripted a violent history of Assam for the next three decades.
32nd anniversary
When ULFA celebrates its 32nd anniversary of struggle on Thursday, Rajkhowa, for the first time, would openly raise the rebel organisation’s flag in the heart of Assam, in a camp in Sivasagar. He will be joined by several other top leaders of the ULFA. Barua will not be with him though. For, the ULFA has suffered a vertical split over the past couple of years. The faction led by Rajkhowa and others have started a peace-process with the Centre and state government. Barua, however, leads the hard-line faction and is opposed to talks.
Rajkhowa, Barua and several other top ULFA leaders had shifted to Bangladesh long ago. The outfit also had a number of guerrilla camps in the neighbouring country. Though the ULFA and other rebel organisations of the northeastern region had to abandon the camps in Bhutan after a crackdown by Royal Bhutan Army in 2003, they had continued to find refuge in Bangladesh and Myanmar.
But with Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League returning to power in Dhaka in January 2009, the situation changed in Bangladesh. A tacit cooperation between Indian and Bangladeshi security agencies resulted in the detention of Rajkhowa and other top ULFA leaders within a year. And they all eventually landed in jails in Assam, well before Hasina came to Delhi on a landmark visit in January 2010. Barua, however, escaped the crackdown, fled Bangladesh and, according to intelligence agencies, took refuge in Myanmar.
By the end of the year, Rajkhowa and other incarcerated ULFA leaders agreed to start the dialogue with the Centre and were released on bail. They went to New Delhi and met prime minister Manmohan Singh on Feb 14 to formally mark the beginning of the peace-process. With just a few weeks left before the Assembly polls, the Congress immediately went to town claiming credit for bringing the militant organisation to the negotiating table.
The opposition Asom Gana Parishad is trying to prick the peace balloon of the Congress. “The peace process will lead to a meaningful solution to the problem of insurgency in Assam, only if Barua is brought into it,” says former chief minister Prafulla Mahanta. Gogoi says that the door would remain open for Barua too.
Prof Nani Gopal Mahanta of the Gauhati University feels that the success of the peace process would depend on the issues that would be on the table. “Sovereignty of Assam may be just an initial bargaining chip for the ULFA. But some of the other core issues which it raised in the past and would expectedly raise during the peace talks too are intrinsically linked with aspirations of Assamese for the past 60 years or so — like the Centre-state relations or the constitutional safeguard for the Assamese,” he says.
While people of Assam never supported ULFA’s secessionist agenda or the violent path chosen by it, the rebel organisation continued to enjoy support from the masses because it was also championing the causes of the historic students’ agitation against influx of migrants in late 1970s and early ’80s.
The peace-process is likely to gain momentum after the polls. And, irrespective of the results, the Centre and the state government will have to make sure that it moves ahead steadily and with reasonable speed, unlike the one with the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isak-Muivah), which failed to make any breakthrough even after many rounds talks over the past 14 years.
0 comments:
Post a Comment